In the next month, a number of retail brands will begin trialling Royal Mail’s new Sunday delivery service across the UK. Royal Mail is currently in discussions with additional retailers about rolling out the service to their customers too.

Royal Mail said it is introducing the service in response to the growth in parcel volumes as more and more consumers shop online and want to receive their purchases as quickly as possible.

The move opens the door to seven-day-a-week parcel deliveries as the service is progressively expanded over the next year.

Record parcel volumes

Lockdown has seen Royal Mail process unprecedented parcel volumes, delivering 496 million parcels in the third quarter which ended on 27 December 2020.

The introduction of a seven-day parcel delivery market for major retail customers is one of the ways Royal Mail is responding to the marked increase in parcel volumes and changing customer expectations for more frequent and more convenient deliveries.

The construction of Royal Mail’s second, and largest, parcel hub is also underway in Daventry in the Midlands as the company accelerates its transformation and manages the growth in demand for parcels.

Once complete, the new hub will be the size of more than ten football pitches and have the capacity to process more than 1 million parcels per day, making it the largest Royal Mail parcel hub in the UK.

Nick Landon, chief commercial officer at Royal Mail, said: “The UK already trusts us to deliver their purchases six days a week both quickly and conveniently. Now for the first time our posties will be doing the same thing seven days a week.

“The last year has reset so many customer expectations and the desire for even more convenient and even more frequent parcel deliveries has certainly been one of them. We always listen to our customers, both senders and recipients, and the ask here was clear: we love what you do Monday to Saturday, so please do the same on a Sunday.

“So that’s what we’re doing, as quickly as possible so we can offer it to more and more customers across the course of this year. It’s another really exciting change delivered by our trusted people and network.”